IFTF Staff Posts

For the past several years, we have been experimenting with online gaming platforms as a way to broaden participation in discussions of complex strategic issues. The issues surrounding piracy in Somalia constitute just such an issue where economic, social, and political problems on the land are acted out by diverse players at sea.

On Monday, July 18, we were delighted to bestow the title of
Distinguished Fellow onto two of IFTF's most prolific contributors—Kathi
Vian and Jacques Vallée. Naming Distinguished Fellows is one of the
ways we honor those who have made exceptional, sustained contributions
to IFTF through research, writing, and mentorship.

Will California reinvent itself again for the 21st century? Can everyday
citizens be empowered to help transform California? Will California
keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or completely collapse? These were the questions posed to the participants of IFTF's California
Dreams: Which Future is Yours contest—challenging everyday people to
make a better future for our state.

The digital peasants are getting restless. The first signs of unrest are evident in the stirrings of the bloggers filing a suit against the Huffington Post and its parent AOL, which acquired the publication in February for $315 million. The same writers who were happy to contribute for free before the sale are now accusing the publication of turning them into “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation."

This year, the first baby boomers reach the age of 65, making them senior citizens by most definitions. What does this dramatic demographic shift mean? Find out at the “A National Forum on the Future of Aging: Looking Ahead,” an event we’re hosting in San Francisco this Friday with the American Society on Aging. IFTF experts will be speaking, including Richard Adler, Health Horizons Director Rod Falcon and Research Manager Miriam Lueck Avery and Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen.

Personal fabrication is a theme that continues to emerge in IFTF’s ongoing technology research. As attention is generated around using 3D printing for everything from organs to buildings, this week was an auspicious time for the Technology Horizons Program to hold its spring expert workshop, focusing on Open Fabrication, at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

Air pollution and asthma, climate change and natural disasters, drought and crop failures, wasteful practices and water shortages. Human health is directly tied to our planet's health and Institute for the Future research shows that the public is starting to understand this

With the recent passing of Paul Baran, one of IFTF's co-founders, we're releasing an excerpt of a report with forecasts from 1971 which has inspired more than 43 years of technology forecasting at IFTF and has spoken to countless audiences looking to connect and improve life using network technology.

Paul Baran, co-founder and early contributor to IFTF was the engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84.

The Institute's new future of making map got a mention in the New York Times.

As important as tinkering has been to the nation’s past, it could become a much bigger deal before long, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. A...

For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a big new project at the Institute. I haven't written that much about it, as we've been... quiet. Now, though, we're starting to take the project public.

The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of science, technology and innovation. The name may sound like science fiction, but it's actually an historical...

A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.

Global connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just some of the drivers reshaping how we think about work, what constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future. This report analyzes key drivers that will reshape the landscape of work and identifies key work skills needed in the next 10 years. It does not consider what will be the...